CHAdeMo announced all-new 150 Kw charging protocol

During CHAdeMO’s annual General Assembly in Tokyo, Japan, the Association’s management has announced its plans and ongoing activities towards bringing high power CHAdeMO chargers to the market: the Association plans to release an amendment to the current protocol, which will enable charging with up to 150kW (350A).

If numbers don’t lie, 33% of new electric vehicles are equipped with CHAdeMO charging, 15% are built to use the Tesla Supercharger network, and 9% are designed with CCS in mind.

Well, as you can see, CHAdeMo is relatively big player on the market.

Plus, other automakers have nothing against it –even in the eyes of Tesla Japanese company has earned the accolade: just try to imagine Tesla selling an adapter that allows its drivers to plug into a CHAdeMO charger. Crazy, isn’t it?

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Interesting fact: 38 percent of battery-electric cars offer no fast-charging capability at all. For PHEVs, 25 percent are equipped for CHAdeMO charging while 75 percent do not support fast charging of any kind.

Nonetheless, within time company’s installations started becoming a little bit obsolete—most of charging stations were in the 40-60 kW range—so, on the first of June 2016 at annual General Assembly in Tokyo, Japan, the Association’s management has announced its plans and ongoing activities towards bringing high power CHAdeMO chargers to the market.

The Association plans to release an amendment to the current protocol, which will enable charging with up to 150kW (350A), this year.

The revision of the protocol, announced to the Regular Members already last year, is still ongoing with technical consultations with members happening both in and outside of Japan.

CHAdeMO’s Secretary General Dave Yoshida said: “One of the purposes of the Association is to evolve CHAdeMO protocol so that it can better respond to market needs. We see a movement towards mass market EVs with higher capacity batteries and we, as the Association of fast charging protocol, prepare for it by working on the high power protocol. This will enable faster deployment of the high power charging infrastructure, in preparation for EVs that can charge with higher power.”

Fixing some issues

Recognizing that the upward trend in electric vehicle autonomy will lead to a need for charging with higher power at key locations, especially along the motorways, CHAdeMO mandated its Technical Work Group to tackle issues such as the size of the high power cable or managing temperature increase of the charger that may come in contact with users.

Unchanged cable

The ‘plug’ itself will remain exactly the same as the current one, meaning the high power CHAdeMO chargers can feed power to both the current electric vehicles as well as the upcoming EVs with higher battery capacity.

Current CHAdeMO vehicles will also be able to use the 150kW charger, but as of now, EVs are configured to charge at around 50kW, so there will have to be made some changes to vehicle’s software.

Dave Yoshida added: “We are very pleased that, thanks to the hard work of our technical team, we will soon be able to release the new version of the protocol to our members. We expect first 150kW standardized chargers to be deployed in 2017.”

Well, 2017 is almost there.

Let’s wish the company good luck with that and other research(more information regarding it below) and wait more news from smart as hell Japanese company that comes up with leading edge technologies.

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CHAdeMO technical representatives are also actively involved in the IEC Committee working on high power charging, where, together with other international experts, they are preparing a revision of the DC high power standards, based on the IEC standards published in 2014. In terms of higher power, for example 350kW (1 000V x 350A), technical studies are ongoing and the Association will determine its further development around 2018, should there be market demand.